Games Pack 7
Reviews Summary C+VG Issue 1 Just what every astronaut dreads — an outbreak of the procreative Green Things on his ship. On a mission in the space exploration ship Znutar, the computer informs you that the Green Things are aboard. This is the main game on Acornsoft's Games Pack No. 7 (£10), which also includes Ballistics and Snake. You start off unarmed and as you move round the ship you must find the Green Things and destroy them with the weapons you find only two of which can be carried at once. Some of them don't do quite what you would expect — but I'll leave you to find out exactly what they do. There are three types of Green Things — big Green Things, little Green Things and eggs. The hardest to kill being the big ones. This game is extremely difficult (well I haven't won yet) since the Green Things seem to multiply too rapidly — in fact, just about whenever you stop to do something. This means it is not worth putting the plan of the ship on the screen since the Green Things may decide to multiply then. In this game, the Green Things will move around, so that if you find nothing in one room. Green Things may arrive there later. After a while I found this game became a bit tedious because a number of actions to prove effective had to be repeated. It requires 2K to run in on the Acorn Atom. Now for Ballistics. This game takes about three minutes to load and requires 3K of program and 6K of screen memory to run in. It also requires the floating point ROM. The game, as you may have guessed, utilises high resolution graphics to print a picture of a hill with little boxes on each side representing the guns. Players take it in turns to fire at each other and the player who is first to score a direct hit gains a point. The hit has to be accurate since when I played, I appeared to have got my shell to hit the other gun, but it was registered as a miss. When you do get a direct hit, the opponent's gun explodes and a huge Christmas tree shape appears in its place while an unrealistic explosion sound comes from the speaker. When numbers are fed in, they actually appear at the bottom of the high resolution screen, however, because the characters are plotted using Basic, they are slow to appear and when entering figures, digits are often missed out. Finally, the Snake program. Snake takes about two minutes to load and requires 2K of program and 1/2K of screen memory to run in. In this game, you have to go round the screen eating up numbers between one and nine which start decreasing after a while. When you eat a number a sound is produced and the snake increases by the value of the number. If you eat the wall or your tail the game stops until you hit a key. then the next one starts. This program, although the shortest and simplest, I found was the most addictive — always wanting to beat the previous high score. The game starts off easy, but as your snake grows it becomes more difficult since there is more to avoid. I found the keys difficult to use. If you are one of those who likes a strategy game, then this is worth buying, otherwise stick to space invaders. Category:Atom Games Category:Acornsoft Category:C+VG Reviews